FIFA Manager 10 Impressions

While EA's FIFA Manager may not be as popular as Sega's Football Manager in the UK, the game dominates in its native Germany. This year, FIFA Manager is set to ship with an online game mode for the first time, which will require no subscription fee to play. We managed to get a first look at the game in Cologne, Germany, which coincidentally is the home of developer Bright Future.

When you install FIFA Manager 10 on your PC, you get two executable files: the single-player game and a new multiplayer game that you can play online. The developer admits that the online component of FIFA Manager 10 is not as deep as the single player game, but it's not meant to replace it. Instead, it's an alternative game that allows up to eight players to pit their management skills against one another.

The host of the game is allowed to set up rules such as the overall time limit for the game and whether or not players are allowed a budget surplus to let them compete with everyone else. For example, if one player chooses Manchester United and another takes up residency at Hull City, then it might not be fair on the latter if they're trying to sign new players.

Once everyone's in the game, every player has 10 minutes to choose their first team, set up training, and make transfers. The transfer system is based around an auction style, so players can bid against one another and the AI-controlled teams for the best players. In the bottom left corner of the main menu, a text window allows every player to send out messages to the group, recommending good players if they're the sporting kind or taunting them if they're not.

When you get into a game against a fellow player, you can watch matches played out via a live ticker feed. The interface is graphical, so you can simply drag players to sub them in and out. You can also quit the online game and resume it at a later date, and if other players want to continue the season and you can't join, you can relinquish control of your team to the AI. Members of the burgeoning FIFA Manager community will also be pleased to hear that you can link your game account to your forum account, so people can track your virtual and real-life personas.

While the developers have spent the last year building the multiplayer game from scratch, they've also been improving the single-player game. You can now remove the "private life" aspect of the game that has irked many reviewers in the past (us included), so you no longer have to worry about managing a wife and children. FIFA Manager has always had a great feeling of authenticity thanks to its official license, and this has been improved with pictures of all English Premier League coaches for the first time.

One of the best new features comes in the match engine, as you can watch the game from the manager's dugout perspective. You can also issue orders to individual players, but you do so at the risk of angering the referee. His status is shown at the bottom of the screen, and he'll go from keeping an eye on you to completely banning you from the sidelines if you shout at your team too often. If that happens, you have to sit the rest of the game out and can't even make substitutions for the rest of the match.

FIFA Manager 10 features plenty of changes, and it will be interesting to see how many people take up the new multiplayer portion of the game. It launches on the PC on October 29 in Europe.